Taft 2012 is is a novel by journalist Jason Heller that imagines what would happen if William Howard Taft suddenly reappeared after a hundred years and decided to run for president in the modern day. It's a funny little lark of a satire—Heller doesn't spend any time worrying about how Taft got here—with an interesting structure and a zippy writing style. If you're into presidential politics, you can gulp it down in a mid-length plane ride, and then completely forget you ever read the thing during the mid-length plane ride back.

The problem is that the politics of the book are way too obvious. Heller's Taft is the usual "common sense" candidate—he's tired of the two-party system, and he thinks these bums in Washington have been riding high on the hog for way too long now. In other words, it's a political position that's as safe as safe can be—he scarcely takes a stance that would offend Republicans or Democrats. It's just boring.

Weirdly, the PR campaign is more interesting than the book it's supposed to promote. On the Taft 2012 website, someone (presumably Heller) is blogging on current political events as Taft. It's an interesting conceit, and it makes me wish the book would be written in real time, so it would include the insane events of the 2012 campaign. We now know it's possible to publish a book in a matter of seconds; it would be something to see a novel published immediately before the Democratic and Republican conventions that included fictional takes on the events of the months before. That kind of immediacy would give the book more heft than it has. As it is, it's appealing for hardcore fans of presidential fiction, and then only as a passing diversion.